The present moment appears to me to be a particularly unhappy one for indulging in gloomy diatribes against the democracy. Books, although they constitute the most durable part of literature, are not, in this day, by any means its sole channel. Periodical literature has certainly been becoming more and more democratic; and if the editors of our newspapers gauge in any degree the taste of their readers, that taste must be becoming more and more inclined to the formal and distinctive parts of writing. A few years ago, the London newspapers were singularly indifferent to the claims of books and of the men who wrote them. An occasional stately column of the _Times_ represented almost all the notice which a daily paper would take of a volume. The provincial press was still worse provided; it afforded no light at all for such of its clients as were groping their way in the darkness of the book-market. All this is now changed. One or two of the evening newspapers of London deserve great commendation for having dared to treat literary subjects, in distinction from mere reviews of books, as of immediate public interest. Their example has at length quickened some of the morning papers, and has spread into the provinces to such a signal degree that several of the great newspapers of the North of England are now served with literary matter of a quality and a fulness not to be matched in a single London daily twenty years ago. When an eminent man of letters dies, the comments which the London and country press make upon his career and the nature of his work are often quite astonishing in their fulness; space being dedicated to these notices such as, but a few years ago, would have been grudged to a politician or to a prize-fighter. The newspapers are the most democratic of all vehicles of thought, and the prominence of literary discussion in their columns does not look as though the democracy was anxious to be thought indifferent or hostile to literature.